In the field of internal combustion engines, cylinder pressure is an important source of data about the combustion process. In particular, many aspects of engine control can be improved with cylinder pressure data. As examples, cylinder pressure data can be used as a feedback to the engine controller, to refer combustion timing, to detect misfire, and to indicate peak cylinder pressure.
Today, extensive engine performance improvement research is being done using cylinder pressure sensors as information sources. However, one problem associated with their use is that they are too expensive to be implemented in production engines.
Furthermore, today's cylinder pressure sensors tend to be too fragile for implementation in production engines. Even for laboratory testing purposes, due to the harsh in-cylinder environment of internal combustion engines (such as high-temperature, high-pressure and strong chemical corrosion) existing cylinder pressure sensors can be unreliable.